I like how three of the four monsters that were used to demonstrate combat were squirrels. All the monsters in their bestiary, and they use squirrels in their big reveal? Yeah, the dragoon looked really cool doing devastating attacks on rodents.

Pretty visuals, but there's no shortage of MMOs with pretty visuals. People didn't leave because the graphics were ugly... they left because of a lack of content. Show us the deep 1-50 content we've all come to expect from modern MMOs.

I like how three of the four monsters that were used to demonstrate combat were squirrels. All the monsters in their bestiary, and they use squirrels in their big reveal? Yeah, the dragoon looked really cool doing devastating attacks on rodents.

Pretty visuals, but there's no shortage of MMOs with pretty visuals. People didn't leave because the graphics were ugly... they left because of a lack of content. Show us the deep 1-50 content we've all come to expect from modern MMOs.

I thought they left because the engine was broken, the interface was a mess and xp fatigue punished you for playing? XD

I dunno what MMOs you've been playing man, but I've never found any of them to be particularly deep till you actually get close to endgame. There's a fair bit of content in the game now but other than the AF quest chains, most of them are pretty rushed experiences with horrible reward chances.

I think SE needs to get over the whole concept that pretty =/= good. At best they will have a serviceable MMO with the expected trappings of the genre. SWTOR showed us you can have great storytelling, TERA showed us you can have great combat and TSW showed us you can have great quests and atmosphere. SE has a golden opportunity to bring all of that together, but they seem to think having an MMO with content and mechanics circa 2005 is going to convince players to leave these other established worlds.

i kinda wish they would drop the class crap and go with jobs full force.

That would require a reworking of the entire character development and balance system. I think the way they have it now works well enough. Jobs are meant to be specialized roles for party play. The classes under the armory system are flexible enough to be solo specialists. The job system as its designed now leaves the door open for more jobs to be added using different permutations of the existing classes, I.E. DRK being MRD+THM. Still, I do understand your point. Who knows? We didn't expect them to abolish fatigue and they did. Anything can happen at this point. Personally, I don't have much issue with these different roles

Well, if they can fix the combat system (making it more fast paced/action oriented), allow us to level off of quests instead of grinding leves, and give us dungeons with better drop rates and no speed runs, i'll be in heaven. Oh, give us AF weapons, not that abortion you call relics.

They expanded character creation a bit for existing choices, but not by much. There's a lot more voice types instead of just three that 1.0 offered, and you can make your boobs small if you want. But there's still only a few hairstyles per race, way less than competing MMOs.

Uematsu's version of the prelude for XIV 1.0 has been removed it seems, in favor of this 2.0 prelude. They're both really good renditions, but I wonder if they've decided to go with an all new soundtrack and abandon 1.0's music.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested in 2.0. Like 1.0 before it had its miserable launch, I really do want it to succeed. I'm curious to see how the adjusted combat system works.

So I'm curious...what happens to all the existing players from 1.0? Do they just get moved to the new game, levels and gear and such as is, or are they all wiped and forced to start from scratch? I mean, it sounds like 2.0 is supposed to be a whole new game, but it's still just FFXIV...isn't it.

Characters are transferred over to the new game with all levels intact. Part of the testing is to ensure everything between the databases migrates properly since there are a few adjustments such as reducing all gil quantities by a factor of 10 since they're adjusting all in-game prices by a factor of 10.

They plan on having servers with 1.0 characters transferred over, and brand new servers at launch where everyone starts from scratch. I'll be playing on the latter, as I never got all that far in the first place in 1.0, and I'd rather be on a brand new server where everyone is on an equal playing field.

Yoshida's been answering questions, and apparently there are more hairstyles and choices that will be available during the beta test and ultimately, at launch. That's good. I know they limited the race selection, but the lack of creation options was a bit concerning considering all the the talk about expanding it.